It's been a troubling couple of weeks for Mandriva, but I decided not to report on it since I found it hard to unravel the events leading up to all this. Now, though, the story has come to its (logical) conclusion: now that most of Mandriva's employees have been laid off, they came together and forked Mandriva. Enter Mageia.

As usual, a large corporation takes over a Linux distro and then screws it up. While I'm not a Mandriva user, I am proud to say I got my start with Linux using Mandrake Linux. It was, at the time, the easiest Linux distro to setup and use. Nothing about that has changed today and Mandriva is as innovating as ever. I for one am happy to see that it will live on in the form of Mageia Linux. What would really be the icing on this cake is if Gaël Duval joined the developers of Mageia. Mr. Duval was always a force and champion of Mandriva and the distro suffered after he was essentially forced out several years ago.